How To Look Busy For 8 Hours At Work,

While Actually Accomplishing Nothing.

The Beginner’s Guide

There’s nothing more depressing than the feeling you get, after about a week into a new office job, when you realize how much you hate it.

But there is good news! You don’t actually have to do anything! That’s right!

In fact, there are MILLIONS of us out there who spend day after day doing absolutely nothing!

This slideshow will guide you through the motions, and prove how realistic it is to do absolutely nothing at work, while managing to keep a good reputation and avoid being laid off.

Here are the

basics…

Train Your Ears

Like any other habitat, in the office jungle, it’s survival of the fittest. You’ll learn pretty quickly the importance of training your ears. You’ll need to be able to pick up on the sound of your boss coming from a mile away. You’ll memorize the way certain people walk. You’ll know a door is about to open milliseconds before it actually does. You’ll even be subtly aware of who is in your surrounding area without even using your eyes. The better you are at this, the better you’ll be at your job.

True slackers shouldn’t have to worry about this too much, as for us it is mainly instinctual.

Always Have Gchat Open

You should have seen that coming.

But for any cube-monkeys who don’t know, gchat is a key element of office survival.

What’s great about gchat is it’s entirely inconspicuous, even without any of the other tips you are about to receive. All you have to do is minimize the chat boxes when you hear someone important walking by, and everything will look ordinary, especially to the old-timers who are not quite in touch with the digital age. They wouldn’t even know how to suspect such a thing.

Trust me when I say you will spend much of your day chatting with your friends. I regularly spend an average of 6-7 hours per day just chatting away.

The Worldwide Web

If your company is like mine, they will already have tried to target and block all of the sites that they don’t want you using. I’ve got to hand it to them, they did a pretty good job of trying to keep me in line. No Facebook, no Victoria’s Secret, no Barstool Sports. But the Internet is just too expansive for anyone to gain full control over. I personally spend a lot of time reading trashy articles on MSN, browsing through perverted Yahoo! answers, and Googl-ing the shit out of anything I can think of. Not to mention, Wikipedia has taken me on some pretty wild intellectual adventures.

Be creative with this, there are endless possibilities.

Covering Your TracksSo now that you know you can spend your time doing almost anything you like, you may tend to get carried away. That’s OK, as long a you remember to cover your tracks.

I always keep random printouts scattered in front of me to make it look like I am working on something. You should also keep an Excel spreadsheet open at all times, as well as a folder or another office program. Neglecting to do this would be extremely careless.

Another thing you can do, although it is not necessary, is randomly choose to shred some paper or make a few copies at the Xerox throughout the day. This will definitely help your credibility.

Another thing I do is keep a box under my desk, where I stash legitimate paperwork that people give to me but I don’t ever intend on filing. That way, if someone asks me for something that they have given me, I’m able to locate it within a few hours and return it to them.

Having a secret box under your desk of real work that you are never going to do is very important if you want to keep your legitimacy rolling over the long term.

Co-WorkersEventually you will begin to learn more about your co-workers’ personalities. This will allow you to have incredible judgment when it comes to your interactions with them. Gary may be by-the-book, but you notice that Cindy has been sending around a lot of funny and considerably inappropriate emails. Once you get a handle on who else is wasting time around you, you can spend small increments of time wasting it together.

However, you should never– ever– tell anyone at work about how little you actually do. Keep it light. The most they should ever know about your time-wasting is the occasional 10-minute chat you’ll have with them after lunch, or the email thread that you are both in on.

Realistically, your time should be spent something like this:

And don’t forget the finishing touches.

Leave “To Do” notes for yourself. Ask a co-worker for a piece of paperwork.Remember your boss’s birthday, and her kid’s name.

After all, bullshitting is all about the tiny details.

Good Luck.